


The Mathematics of the Aftereffects of Death

by scuttlesworth



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-05
Updated: 2012-10-05
Packaged: 2017-11-15 16:58:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/529509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scuttlesworth/pseuds/scuttlesworth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock takes a long walk off a short roof. John learns about emotional subtraction. No actual math is involved. </p><p>Originally posted on ff.net as Colouring Between The Lines.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He sees the fall and runs and is knocked over and gets up and runs and there are too many people in the way but he can see concrete and blood, very red blood, thick dark red blood, and black hair all sticky and white pointy nose and cheekbones oh god and he gets a wrist. Just by the fingertips. It's still warm. There's no pulse. The people, too many people he's saying he's a doctor why are they pushing him back so many hands and arms in the way when he can get there needs to get there needs to hold on please hold on please make this not be real please please please come back

He has a shock blanket. It's because he is very, very cold and can't seem to stop shaking. They have him on a bench because the ambulance is gone. Lestrade is there and he is white-faced and looks sick. Donnovan is there and she has turned grey-green but she says something vicious, something cutting, and John looks up and sees her. Lestrade winces, looks down at John with anxiety written all over his face. John looks over at Donnovan and just sits there. Coils. Waits. Lestrade relaxes. She comes over to Lestrade to report, only a minute later, and opens her mouth and John moves like he used to move before the shot and the limp and even before Sherlock, and the crack of his hand across her face echoes off the ambulance. She stumbles backwards and goes to one knee; it was that kind of slap. Lestrade has John's arms and is saying something in his rushing ears but John can't hear him. He can see Donnovan get up, a white then red imprint of his hand across her cheek and temple, and she's pointing and yelling something about having him arrested and Lestrade whirls on her and says "Consider yourself lucky you won't be suspended." John looks at her with deadly eyes and thinks, this is not entirely your fault but some of it is, and I do not forgive you.

Donnovan turns pale, turns her back, and stalks off with more speed than grace.

Anderson does not show up.

It'll have to be enough.

The patrolman sent up to check the jump site radios back. Dead body up there and a gun, he says. More police arrive and head up to the roof. It's a circus complete with flashing lights and crowds. John is suddenly very focused. Moriarity.

Up until now he's been assuming Sherlock was alone, that Sherlock lost somehow. Now there's something else and he feels a vicious desire to observe this upstairs corpse. He's seen the one, now he needs the other. He stands and follows Lestrade. No-one looking at his face has the nerve to object. They go up stairs and up more stairs and out a door and onto the tarpaper and gravel roof, crunching underfoot, and there's the body with a couple patrolmen standing about, and there's a gun and there's a broken phone and John needs to see the body first all the rest can wait. He heads over, cutting in front of Lestrade and ignoring everything except fine soft dark short hair and a tiny build, such a little body, almost a teenager's. So slight to contain all that malice. He crouches and takes the pulse at the wrist and it feels so different from Sh. From. It's limper, cooler, deader. He moves around to the face, completely indifferent to the officer who stumbles back out of his way with an oath.

The face is almost ruined. Almost. John, though, would recognize any part of this corpse. This man. His hands, half his nose, his shoulders, his shoes - anything. John stares at the one eye he can see which is bulging out of the skull from the shockwave of the gunshot and he feels both a terrible relief and a terrible grief, and he begins to snicker. He buries his face in his hands and crouches there, shaking with laughter, until someone makes him get up and go away.

Lestrade stops them before they leave the roof. "John. John, was it him?"

John can only nod. A patrolman walks him down, back to the bench to sit and wait some more.

Eventually they take his statement. He tries to tell the whole story. Watches them write it down to make sure they get it right. Then they offer, can we take you home? And he stares at them. No, they cannot take him home. He's not going home, is he? He's going into the morgue to see the other body.

Except he's not. He's standing in the hallway and Molly is turning three shades of red and white but she's refusing to let him in to see Sher no the no no John needs to see, needs to be there when Molly, when Molly cuts, when. Molly refuses. Refuses Lestrade. Refuses everyone who has followed John like he's the pied piper. Little Molly suddenly seeming to grow exasperated and a spine, and she snaps in her little voice that it's her Mortuary and she'll let who she needs in and not a single other person. She glares at them, her gaze changing to worried sympathy when it hits John, and she opens her mouth to say something but a fine line crinkles between her eyebrows and instead she shakes her head and reaches out to touch his arm. Her hand never connects. She closes her mouth and heads back through the doors and locks them behind her, John knows because despite what she said he tries them, and her face is full of something sad when she watches him through the little window. Then she's gone.

And Lestrade claps him on the shoulder and steers him stumbling back through the hospital and to a police car. Sticks him in the back of it. He stares out the window at London, it's gotten dark, when did it get dark? Dark is better. He doesn't want to see the city, the lights are good. He watches the lights until they get to Baker Street. Lestrade offers to come up. John says no. John leaves the shock blanket in the back of the police car, neatly folded.

Mrs. Hudson is waiting, her face so frightened. He just looks at her. She bursts into tears, and comes over and weeps on his shoulder, and it takes him forever to lift his arms and put them up to her back because he does not want to move. So tired.

She bundles him into her flat and gets him tea which he only barely tastes before putting it down. He lies on her sofa because he cannot go up the stairs to their flat and she drapes him with a blanket, another blanket now not orange but crocheted from little colorful squares. He lies there. All he sees all night long are black coats and concrete with blood and black curls and pale skin. All night long his fingers feel Sherlock's wrist and no pulse and Moriarity's wrist and no pulse and how different they were even in death.

When the morning light comes and the windows are pale enough to see the room, Mrs. Hudson is still asleep. He gets up. Folds her blanket and drapes it over the back of the sofa. Opens her front door carefully so it will not creak and closes it behind him. Steps on the stairs.

Each stair is as clear to his eyes as a thing under a magnifying glass. Every smudge, every scuff, stands out sharp as a blade. He can see them, all of them, and they are burning themselves into his mind, but he can make no sense of them. Is the scuff coming or going? Up or down? Shoe polish or the rubber from a coaster on a chair? That snag in the carpet, has it always been there? He goes up slowly, forced to see everything, unable to comprehend anything.

The living room is full of Sherlock. Already it smells disused, though. John stares about, tries to determine what he needs to do. He reaches out to move a glass which had liquid in it, sweated and left a ring on a book and he can't. Just can't touch it. His hand shakes like a leaf the closer it gets to the glass until he snatches it back and tucks it under his arm. So he goes to the kitchen. Stares about. Chemistry set. It's not on, there's no flame. Dead and cold and silent. John cannot think what to do in here either. He leaves.

Sherlock's room. John doesn't even go near it. That's an invasion of privacy he will not contemplate even now. He thinks vaguely that the police might come and check over the house, but why would they? Sherlock jumped. There's a crime there but not one which warrants a house inspection. If they do come there's always Mycroft.

Mycroft. John feels a sick lurch. Surely Mycroft knows by now. Surely Mycroft of all people will know. He always had them under surveillance. John shouldn't have to. Tell.

He can't stay here. The thought crystalizes in his mind. He can't touch anything here, and the things are going to grow dusty waiting for their owner to come back, and he can't watch that. He heads up to his room with a purposeful step.

Bedroom. Bag. Clothes. Socks, underwear, shirts, jumpers (oh that word), slacks, jeans, spare shoes. Laptop. Gun. Gun gun gun. Gun goes in the bag, John, but instead it goes in his jacket pocket. Just in case.

Bathroom: toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, shampoo, razor, painkillers, etc.

And that's all he has. Nothing else. One large duffel, fuller now than when he moved in but still with room to spare, and one small shoulder bag. He looks around. Did he sit so lightly here then?

There are other things he could take. Mugs and saucers and blankets and pillows. He leaves them. He goes downstairs. Looks around.

He takes one thing of Sherlock's. Carefully wraps it in his ugliest Christmas jumper, and sticks it in the center of his bag. It looks up at him as he wraps it, and he pats it gently. "It's all right," he says out loud in a rusty voice to it before he tucks the jumper sleeve over the empty eye sockets.

Now he's ready to go.

If only he knew where.

He ends up at Sara's. Not very far to flee, really. When he leaves the front of the house the press are starting in, pulling up outside. A couple cameras go off but he's got his jacket up and gets away unscathed, if not unphotoed. He was going to walk but the press are following, calling out just short of shouting, so he hails a cab. Has to give it an address then, and the only addresses he knows in London are all wrong - Barts no, NSY no, Baker Street he's at, too early for the pub and the pub is too close. Sara's it is, then.

He gets out on her front step and pays the cabbie and feels lucky he actually has the money for it, since he didn't check his wallet before he gave the address and there's barely twenty quid in there. He stands on Sara's doorstep in the middle of the morning, watching the cab drive off, and thinks: She'll be at work. He's already thinking of other places to go. But he's come this far, so he rings the doorbell anyways, and she answers, and he thinks: Oh, silly. She's not on shift. Have I woken her? And she just looks at him and reaches out and hugs him, and he doesn't react or cry, so she pulls him inside and there's more tea. And she says if he wants to talk about it. And he says thank you, politely, because she's being kind and means it, she'll listen, but he won't be talking about this at all.

He stays on her couch that night and the next. Then he finds another flat.

He can't bear her looking at him with such sympathy, as though he were about to burst into tears at any moment.

There is a funeral. He attends. Mrs. Hudson attends. Mycroft attends. Lestrade attends. Molly attends. A number of people John vaguely recognizes attend. John does not cry. He nods and talks to people politely. He does not remember what he says or what they say.

Molly watches him anxiously. He ignores her. They have nothing in common now except grief.

Mycroft appears in his flat a few days later, sitting in the only chair. Mycroft does not comment on the only decoration in the flat, which rests on the living room shelf. He has had the courtesy to make tea and set a cup out for John. There are biscuits too, John's favorite, which he has not been in the mood for lately. John nibbles on one politely anyways, perched on the edge of his bed while Mycroft pokes and prods and takes his emotional temperature. Checking up on him, John thinks, wondering exactly why Mycroft is bothering. Their only connection is utterly absent. He looks Mycroft over, noting that the man has gained a few pounds. Some people loose weight under stress, others gain it. Mycroft and Sh… his brother. Are. Were. So opposite.

After John stops responding and sits staring off at the wall near Mycroft's head for a good five minutes, half a biscuit dangling from his hand, Mycroft leaves. He looks unexpectedly sad, and angry.

Lestrade tries to come by. John is not at home.

John leaves the flat every day. He needs to walk. He walks compulsively, at all times of the day and night, in every part of London. Sometimes he visits Mrs. Hudson, but he never goes upstairs. Sometimes he visits Sarah, but he never stays the night. Sometimes he walks through the worst parts of town he can find. He wishes someone would try and mug him or glass him or vomit on his shoes, but even in the seediest parts of the city no-one ever does. He feels as though he has an invisible escort. Once or twice he thinks he spots them, people who just don't quite fit in the way he doesn't quite fit in. Men in coats which he's seen a few times, women wearing shoes which seem far too sensible for the rest of their outfits. He tries, whimsically, to loose them but instead he looses interest after a few minutes.

It is six months. He's working again at the clinic, but it barely occupies half his attention. His hands shake again but it doesn't matter; if he braces his wrists on something, he can still make perfectly even stitches. He hasn't got the limp back but he carries the cane regardless.

Things happen. Once a drunk comes in, aggressive, shouting. A nurse is trying to get him to sit still so she can check his pupils, see if he has concussion, and the man backhands her. Grabs her by the hair when she stumbles and starts to slam her into the wall. John is just outside the hall and he steps inside, punches the man neatly in the throat and catches the nurse. The man is choking, gurgling, clutching his throat while John carefully gets the nurse settled in a chair. Other nurses arrive. John orders the drunk restrained and waits while the man's face turns purple until his arms and legs and head are strapped to the table before leisurely performing a tracheotomy to get the man's airway open again.

The man vomits and the acid gets in the incision. John does not seem surprised or sympathetic when he hears. Contrary to his expectation, the nurses don't seem revolted by his lack of compassion for the patient. Instead, they are quite nice to him after that; there's something about someone who will do unquestioning violence for you that's attractive.

He goes to the grave only once. It is the only time he cries when he is awake.


	2. You Don't Start A Fire Over Somebody Who's Dead

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted on ff.net under the same title. John keeps on carrying on, and finds there's plenty of work to do. Angst.

It's not getting any better.

There was a sun. A brilliant, flaring, violent exothermic nuclear reaction, one that lit his life and burnt away the nightmares, that turned him from winter to summer. That singed his hair and gave him a burn and made everything visible. It was terrifying and glorious, to discover that he had fallen into orbit around such a sun. Not some safe little star, but a giant, a celestial mass of such volume and intensity that all other suns paled by comparison.

Then it all went wrong. Supernova, he thinks. And what is left behind is a black hole in the pit of his stomach.

All the light is gone out of the world. He does not know how he will cope. And time is not healing this.

 

John stands in the freezer section and tries to understand what his eyes are looking at. It takes effort. He's been standing there for several minutes, he thinks, and tries to shake himself out of the distraction. He reaches for the freezer door-handle to open it and grab something, some random brightly coloured package that might involve frozen vegetables which he absolutely loathes, and feels it tear open inside his guts like stitches. It howls and howls and draws everything into itself, all the careful little thoughts he's had skimming over his mind all week about needing to pull out money and needing to pay bills and needing. And he keeps moving, grabs a package and drops it in his basket without knowing what he's gotten and moves to the front of the store to pay because this is what you do. Like being a train on railroad tracks instead of a car on the motorway, he allows the requirements of his life to move him along.

 

If anyone speaks to him, he knows he smiles a little smile and replies and is generally as pleasant as he can manage being. He is polite, excruciatingly polite, and courtesy is a brilliant set of armor to keep everyone away. Some of them look worried despite his best of forts; those, he avoids.

 

He picked up the gun and held it the other day. Looked at it, really looked at it, and contemplated what it could do to a human body in exquisite clinical detail. Considered shooting the wall. Did not do so because it would be overly dramatic and excessively grieving and possibly get him sent away, and he does not want that. He eyes the thought warily and puts the gun down on the end table, where he can reach it. In case he needs it.

What he could possibly need it for is beyond him. The monster is dead and gone. Buried in an unmarked prison plot that Mycroft showed him one day, sympathy oozing from his every pore. But the weapon gives him - not comfort, no. The weapon is like a rock in his mind, a steady stable point.

 

 

Mycroft has the violin. Do you play, then, he asked without thinking, just to say something, and felt like such a fool after. Mycroft looked at him so kindly. No, he replied. Tone deaf. And he put it away in its case and John walked out.

 

 

He thinks the lines on his face have gotten deeper. He imagines that someday they will carve straight through his skull, and the pieces of his head will fall apart like a puzzle leaving his body just sitting there.

 

He thinks perhaps he has gone a little mad.

There was the emotional paralysis leading up to and after the funeral. There was the denial and the confusion. The fact that he couldn't go near the flat. The bedsit he ended up in.

Mycroft.

 

 

Mycroft brought him the papers. Said to keep them safe. Said they were important. Had his minions haul them in, boxes and boxes of them smelling like the flat, like acids and oils and wet newspaper. Mycroft could have stored them in a storage locker somewhere, John thinks, looking at them cluttering up his room. Mycroft who does look fatter now than before. More tired. Less pristine.

He waits until everyone is gone to open one, and to his surprise, he does not cry. Instead, he feels as though some terrible ending has been postponed, some doom temporarily stayed. As though he is balancing on a very fine wire, gliding on the merest thread of a breeze. It's not hope, then; but it is something. Some suspension of his fears.

Lestrade comes by. John has mostly forgiven him for not being enough to protect Sherlock from the monster. He's just a DI, after all. Barely even that after the press got ahold of him.

Lestrade brings the old case files John asked for. The ones that fill in the gaps on the stories.

He begins to write again.

 

He writes blog entries. Nothing personal. Nothing with himself in it. He spent months pulling notes and research papers together with his own recollections of little things Sherlock said. He sorted and filed and stacked and collated. And now he's got them, and all set and ordered neatly in a way that would absolutely appall Sherlock, so he starts writing. Because he cannot bear to hear the crap people are saying, because the record is wrong, because more than believing he knows deep in his bones that the things in the press are lies like wounds on the truth. He is a doctor. He can stitch this. So he uses words, and once he starts typing he does not stop. He types for days, barely getting up. It feels like fighting.

Sometimes he gets tired. Sometimes he crashes on the end, barely remembering to pull the blanket over himself. He remembers to shower and eat, mostly. But mostly he reads, and he writes.

It's an obsession, and he knows he's become a bit of the mental case locked in his room. But it feels so good, to have Sherlock there solving things in front of his eyes. To write up the notes and turn them into stories. To put them out there into the world, over and over, one story after another. Even when the comments come flooding in and are horrible, hateful, loathing, death threats. He starts keeping the gun closer, now, with some of the things people say. He gets twitchy going to the store. His shoulders hunch, his eyes flicker.

Nothing so pointless as fear can stop him on this, though.

He's got a mission.

Lestrade comes by a lot, after that. They spend time pouring over the files. Lestrade wants him to report the death threats to Donnovan. John looks flatly back at him. Greg is forgiven; Sally is not. Besides, he says, with a shrug as he goes limping back to the fridge for an apple and some cheese, it's not like the threats are a secret or anything. Sure, some of the worse ones come to his public e-mail, but a lot of them are comments on the blog. Open for anyone to see. If the police want to know about them they will. If they want to investigate they will.

So far, Lestrade is the only one who has come by with concerns, and he's not really a police anymore.

 

 

Someone throws paint all over the bedsit's front door. Red paint.

John moves out. The family who owns the building are apologetic but firm.

Lestrade helps him with the boxes.

 

 

There are dead rats pushed through the mail slot.

Mycroft sends a van and minions, and tries to arrange a more secure location.

John refuses. He won't live like that.

 

 

They burn down the rental.

Everything was scanned in anyways, an online database secure enough to put the NSY to shame, locked by an RSA key Mycroft handed him casually some time ago. He didn't think anything of it then. Now…. Mycroft foresaw this, John thinks as he stands in front of the burning house, watching the firemen work to put it out. Petrol, they say, and John agrees; he smelled it while he was writing, grabbed what he needed and bolted. He's standing there on the street wearing his robe, barefoot, holding his laptop. The gun is dragging the pocket of the robe down on one side but no-one is about to comment on the state of his clothing. He thinks, I forgot to grab the skull, and then shunts the thought aside. He has refused a shock blanket and refused to sit. His mind is working. 

This wasn't the act of people passively angry about a con artist, he thinks. This was an act of war.

A car pulls up. The door opens and Anthea is in the back.

John feels something fierce and victorious inside.

There's a battle going on. He knows it. Somewhere out of sight something is happening, in the dark, beyond his senses.

He gets in the car.


	3. InterMission

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John's residence has burnt down. He's stuck (temporarily) accepting the charity of Mycroft Holmes. But really, it doesn't matter where he writes, as long as it's secure and has internet. Except for the fact that Anthea is his babysitter, which he would complain about, but he's kind of glad not to be stuck alone anymore. She's rather restfully quiet. 
> 
> Mostly.

He's coming to the end of it now. There were over a hundred files (one hundred and twenty two exactly) but it's been a year and a half and he's been diligent. Too diligent. There's only the one left.

So he takes a break. Says he deserves it. A week of Relaxing.

 

Mycroft doesn't argue. Says a bit of a pause now is a useful thing for the readers. Says he hopes the last case John writes up will be a good one, though, to reward those who will have to wait, who have been patiently following (and screaming about and ranting on and discussing) his blog for this whole journey.

John's throat won't work but he nods. The last case is indeed a good one.

When Mycroft leaves he goes and, for the first time, checks out the liquor cupboard in the living room. It turns out to be stocked with very nice Scotch; John looks around the spartan quarters and snickers. Trust Mycroft. Still, despite the alcohol, he doesn't get to sleep until very late that night.

When all of this is done, he tells himself, when the last case is written up, he'll be moving out. Mycroft has sheltered him long enough. Time to go again.

 

 

Morning comes later than normal, although he doesn't have a hangover. He yawns and stretches as he comes out of his room. Anthea, whose real first name he now knows is Claire or possibly Jeanette if she's not lying again which is doubtful, is already up. She's wrapped in a robe and curled up on one end of the sofa texting, exactly the same as she is every morning. He says hullo; she humms something absently in response without looking up or her fingers slowing. He no longer takes this personally; it's how she responds to everyone but Mycroft. He's still not sure whether they're sleeping together or not. Mycroft could be as sexless as a Ken doll under his suit for all John knows. For all John cares to think about, either.

He detours near her on the way to the kitchen and grabs her empty cup. This earns him a faint wave of thanks, which is more than Sherlock ever did, honestly. It doesn't hurt nearly as much to think Sherlock's name anymore. He snags his own mug from the rack and sets it beside hers, then starts filling the kettle.

He carries both hot teas back out, deposits her cup on the table by her elbow and sits in the blocky chair opposite her. She texts one-handed while snagging the cup without looking at it. It's a neat trick.

For a while, he just looks at the room while he wakes up. Beige carpet, blocky tan sofa, blocky wooden end tables, blocky cabinet full of posh booze, an elderly television gathering dust in one corner. A window with dark green curtains last made in the 70's. A cheap bookcase with battered popular paperbacks and a couple scratched old dvd's. White walls. The rest of the house is just as ugly.

Somehow it's tremendously comforting nonetheless; might be to do with the foot-thick walls and the bomb-resistant glass on the window, though. Or the fact that he's been there for months now, long enough to get accustomed to the less than overstuffed cushions and the lumpy beds. Reminds him a bit fondly of barracks life.

Anthea is an oddity in the utilitarian decor; her robe is silk and elaborately patterned, her makeup clutters the one bathroom, her perfume lingers in the air long after her shower is done. It was awkward at first, but they've managed to muddle around each other. Well. John's done most of the muddling; she hasn't exactly made any concessions. Not that he needs many. He's living just as lightly here as he has everywhere else for the past couple years. His only decoration is still the skull, which is sadly worn; it didn't survive the fire well. John's made such repairs as he can, but it's not in perfect nic.

He doesn't even know he's going to ask her a question until it's out of his mouth. "How did you meet Mycroft, then?"

Her fingers keep texting, but her eyebrows come up and the rest of her face follows until she's actually looking at him. A little smile plays over her lips for a moment, then she ... Actually lowers her phone. John just gapes.

"He rescued me from the steno pool," she replies.

"Steno pool," John repeats stupidly. Shakes his head. "Sorry, that's just..."

Her lips twitch and, just like that, a little light goes on in his head. "Oh," he says, and pinches his lips together so he won't laugh at his own ignorance. "Not that sort of steno pool, then." He takes a sip of his tea. Thinks. She's watching him. After a moment, he caves into his curiosity. "What sort of steno pool was it?"

A smirk drifts across her features. "One that speaks forty-seven languages," she replies.

"Forty-seven!" marvels John. Shakes his head. "So he rescued you from this life of boredom to what, type for him? Be Mycroft in training, replace him when he retires?"

She's looking back at the cell in her hands. Her answer is almost absent. "Oh no. I could never replace him; no-one could. We've got a couple programs going to clone him and virtualize his brain. No, I'm going to be Prime Minister in about 30 years." Her gaze drifts up, and she eyes him consideringly. "Going to get married next year. Can't get the popular vote without a decent husband. Gloria - she's still in the steno pool - has been sorting through potential candidates all month. Shouldn't be long now before we pick someone."

John gapes. Her gaze turns thoughtful, and she lifts one hand to curl a finger near her lips. Looks him dead in the eye. "Although..."

John swallows. Hs throat clicks. Anthea-Claire-Jeanette leans forward. Her robe gapes just a bit at the hollow of her throat. John, quite manfully, keeps his gaze on her face. She's smiling. "Decent, hard-working, famous writer, war veteran, older, respectable, doctor, kind face..."

The tips of John's ears are burning like fire. "No, nonono," he chokes out. "Oh no. None for me thank you very much." Sees the look on her face. "Oh god. Not that you're not attractive, you're beautiful, it's just. Ah..." He tumbles to a halt as he properly registers her expression. She giggles. He relaxes. "Ah." Sips his tea. "Funny."

She leans back, her eyes sliding back down to the cell phone. Fingers flying. Her lips are still quirked.

He can barely hear her as she murmurs, "Pity."


End file.
